Skyrim Creation Kit Goes Live, With a Bonus

The Skyim Creation Kit is finally here, along with a gorgeous new high-resolution texture pack that will make your PC weep.

It’s been a long and oft-delayed wait, but the Skyrim Creation Kit is finally out the door. It’s free to everyone with the PC version of Skyrim and access to Steam, and will allow players with a creative bent to build new questions, locations and characters, modify the game in just about every way imaginable and then share the fruits of their labors through the Skyrim Workshop on Steam.

To help ease budding world-builders into the job, the first of a ten-part series of Creation Kit tutorial videos has been released and a crash course in how to begin creating and uploading mods is available from level designer Joel Burgess. Burgess also warned that Bethesda isn’t interested in having “offensive, copyrighted or trademarked material” on the Skyrim Workshop. “Mods with this kind of content will be banned, so please don’t bother uploading them,” he said.

Riding in alongside the Creation Kit is the Skyrim High Resolution Texture Pack, a free update that adds a whole new level of visual fidelity to the PC version of the game. But with great textures comes the responsibility to have great power, or something like that; however you want to put it, your rig will need to exceed the recommended system specs – that’s recommended, kids, not minimum – if you want to have any hope of running this beast. That means Windows Vista or 7, a minimum 4GB RAM and a DirectX 9.0c compatible Nvidia or ATI video card with at least a gig of RAM.

And now, some links. The Skyrim Creation Kit is available on Steam [open your Steam library, select “Tools” from the dropdown menu and look for “Creation Kit”], Joel Burgess’ introduction to the Skyrim Workshop can be read on the Bethesda Blog, the first part of the Creation Kit Tutorial Video series is up on the Bethesda Game Studios YouTube Channel [and also above] and last but not least, a handy-dandy wiki is available for your perusal at creationkit.com. Have fun!